Mamba News

FREE Images To Use In Your Blogs

Where do you find images that you can use in your blog posts? I have come across a lot of people who quite happily just download something they find on Google and use it in their blogs, but did you know these images may well be copyrighted? Did you know that you can get fined 10’s of thousands of pounds for using images without someones’ permission? Well yes you can.

There are plenty of websites out there that say they offer free images but many of these come with restrictions – you have to read the licence restrictions. Often they are only free to use if they are being used for PERSONAL use only and not for business.

Another thing is the licences can be quite confusing and do not clearly state what the exact restrictions are or the small print is just difficult to understand!

One of my favourite image resources is PhotoDropper

PhotoDropper offers loads of free images to use with your blog and even has a WordPress plugin. With just a few simple clicks you can sort through the millions of Creative Commons and Premium photos to find the perfect one for your blog post and insert it into your blog post in just 3 clicks. Images are saved locally to your blog and licensing is handled reallly easily!

How to use Photodropper on your WordPress site

Go to Plugins on your WordPress dashboard and Add New and search for photodropper then install the plugin and activate.

Then go to your post and you should see a little balloon appear to the right of where it says Add Media just below where you add a Title to your blog post.

Click on the balloon

Now you come to a window – choose whether site makes money or not and click on YES for the Legal Stuff – you will also have to enter your email

Then in the next window you type in what you want to search for in the top left and hit Enter

For free images to use, choose those images on the left hand side

Click on the image of your choice or keep scrolling through the page using the arrows in the top right

Once you have selected your image click Insert to Post

Then click on it again in the Media gallery – you can add ALT tags or resize the image – then click on Insert into Post

The last thing to do is choose where you want the attribution of the photographer to show (this is a link to the photographer in exchange for using the image for FREE!)

If you are back in your post check down the right side column below Tags – there should be another box called Photo Attribution Location with a choice of “In photo captions” or “at the end of the post” or “use Photodropper PHP Tag”